feral

36 ms·

271.
by feral 13y ago
In the 'but then it gets even more complicated' spirit: When the author mentions buying a ticket in the end, for the entertainment of fantasising about a potential windfall, I was reminded of this interesting Less Wrong article: &
272.
by feral 13y ago
The EU, which Germany is a major part of, passed the Data Retention Directive [0] in 2006. That directive required every state in the EU to pass laws that all their citizens telecommunications metadata would be stored for at least 6 months,
273.
by feral 13y ago
Doesn't sound like a good idea to me - what about the unintended consequences? If an employee's laptop goes missing, you want them to promptly notify IT, so that measures can be taken to plug any security holes. You don't want them to try t
274.
by feral 13y ago
"You, the person who has reached the centre will be the god of all people who are playing Godus. [Molyneux's upcoming god game.] You will decide on the rules the game is played by. [...] Every time people spend money you will get a small pi
275.
by feral 13y ago
Secure tenured positions are very competitive globally. There are only sufficient such jobs for a small percentage of PhD graduates. Further, the university sector may be on the verge of massive disruption - look at startups such as Courser
276.
by feral 14y ago
>The primary value of BitCoin is its anonymity and difficulty to trace. That means that the people that made it appreciated those values. There are many simple things that could have been done to make it more anonymous. The blockchain c
277.
by feral 14y ago
As an additional point to this, something I often don't see acknowledged is that ASICs have to be produced by chip fabs, which due to their nature are capital intensive and centralized, and hence relatively easy to bring under government co
278.
by feral 14y ago
I have a dual monitor setup, with 27 inch (2560x1440) and 24 inch flat IPS displays. They are fantastic to develop software on, and they cost less than my PC. I couldn't have afforded anything like this 12 years ago. I guess it depends what
279.
by feral 14y ago
That phrase isn't even logically valid. But lets say we accept its argument anyway, is it really applicable here? Would you really argue that the creation of a new cryptocurrency is a zero-sum event? Couldn't it instead be the case that eno
280.
by feral 14y ago
'Some Israeli CS students'? That seems a little un-generous: the authors have published papers since the 80s, and one has a Turing award. But I think the study you actually want might our study, which focuses on anonymity: http://anonymit
281.
by feral 14y ago
I know nothing about the domain of teacher measurement, and have no opinion on it. But the first chart in the blog post, with the big mass of blue on it, is surely not the strong evidence of weak correlation, that the author is making it ou
282.
by feral 14y ago
Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character in a fictional world - as we all know. But there are many articles written as if Holmes is a real person, such that we could extract valuable life lessons by studying how Holmes solved problems - on
283.
by feral 14y ago
If you read the linked post its clearer whats going on: http://madvis.blogspot.ie/2010/09/flying-bombs-on-london-sum... The poisson analysis is only done on a subset of the area thats in the 3d plots: "Clarke's analysis was focused on the
284.
by feral 14y ago
>where every atom of your body is replicated with pristine accuracy. Otherwise you are not yourself anymore. Thats a very strong claim which you provide no basis for, in that comment or in your follow-ups. Maybe replication at the level
285.
by feral 14y ago
Actually, I think the suggestion in the report is correct. I think that what they are getting at here, is the following scenario: Imagine that you have several addresses, with different balances, in the same wallet . If you do a payment
286.
by feral 14y ago
Finding clusters in graphs is a big research interest in the research group I'm part of. When we started looking at Bitcoin we thought that we would have to use such sophisticated algorithms to uncover interesting structure, but it turned o
287.
by feral 14y ago
>Given that Bitcoin records all transactions for posterity, and given the ongoing rise of "big data" analytics, I'd say Bitcoin is likely to be harder, in the long run, to use for shenanigans. A government currency has forms in which tr
288.
by feral 14y ago
Right, there's a simplifying assumption of fungibility in my post. In your counter example, you go to the other extreme, where its either a successful but low-social-utility business, or an unsuccessful high-social-utility one. In reality,
289.
by feral 14y ago
>Telling entrepreneurs that one class of businesses is more socially correct than others isn't how the world works. Start a company selling assassinations, and the wider world will quickly tell you your business isn't socially correct -
290.
by feral 14y ago
You might find this idea of interest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrioshka_brain
291.
by feral 14y ago
>Your post strikes me as naive. All that laundering does is tag more addresses as "hot". You still have a graph of where the bitcoins have gone. Lets say you have an address with 1000 bitcoins in it. A thief steals a lot of bitcoins, an
292.
by feral 14y ago
People have talked about 'marking' Bitcoins before. There are some issues with the idea. Some of them are subtle: The first thing to realize is that bitcoins do not exist as independent trackable entities, in the system. So there are no i
293.
by feral 14y ago
You don't seem to understand how Bitcoin works: the balance of the address is what has the 'coins'. They dont exist independent of the balance of the address. So you can't spend them from a different address, without first transferring the
294.
by feral 14y ago
They aren't that inherently anonymous; the transaction flow can be traced to a limited extent. For example, if the thieves just did something naive, like transfer all those 'coins' to an address in a wallet they had previous used, or th
295.
by feral 14y ago
What it means is that we did something stupid. I'm not sure how novice you are, so I'll take it from the top. So, lets say you have a large training set - a large number of randomly chosen example essays, and a score for each essay. You wa
296.
by feral 14y ago
Yes - even if you are only allowed look at the validation set twice a day, you can still overfit it, with sufficient days. But thats hardly a criticism of Kaggle. Its the responsibility of the person building the ML model to take steps to a
297.
by feral 14y ago
Could you explain what you mean by its 'designed not to allow for this'? That seems a very sweeping criticism. I took part in the last essay scoring competition on Kaggle. In that competition, the data set was the original text of the essay
298.
by feral 14y ago
I recently watched: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uoda5BSj_6o in which Eliezer Yudkowsky talks about challenges in making 'friendly' AI. Yudkowsky draws a lot of examples from evolution to show how a system blindly optimising for an obje
299.
by feral 14y ago
A lot of those workspaces consist of a laptop (often 13inch macbook) on a desk. Laptop screens, on desks, are at the wrong height for ergonomics - you shouldnt have to look down at the screen all day. People should be using large dedicated
300.
by feral 14y ago
As gms7777 points out, for the RNG, surely you can just share seeds? Your comment about the differences in how CPUs deal with floats is very interesting. I found the following interesting comment, from a GPG employee, talking about how they

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